IIEX APAC 2024: Getting Us Thinking

2 days in Bangkok. 40+ speakers, 400 attendees. My 5th time co-chairing the event. A lot of learning and sharing and laughter. And maybe FOUR big themes that stood out. 

Yeah Yeah AI is Hot: but the Real News is Goal of Empathy

In the last year you could not go to any conference for any industry without at least three quarters of speakers managing to squeeze “gpt” in somewhere. Usually for no reason than to show they were on trend.

What was refreshing here was that while by my estimate over half of the speakers talked about AI in some way the emphasis was on how to leverage the tech with more emphasis on humanization and empathy.  The role of people working with AI to get greater scale but also more depth of learning that can make real people’s lives come to life. 

The speakers that were of greatest interest were those that explained not only more efficient or comprehensive or scale outcomes from adopting AI in some way but also how to integrate it with human involvement. Not just automated emotional response checking. After all some of us having been using very good AI platforms for that for a decade.

What got the audience interested was when speakers talked of “people” (not “consumers”) and using platforms that would allow us more time to look at how people react, what is happening in the rest of their lives when not using a specified category to expand opportunities. AI providing efficiency, and then good market research people helping to understand people.

Bespoke Pricing: What is Value for Customers

This was the backchat. Three nights of dinners with groups of attendees, corridor chats in breaks, listening in to vendors and clients talking and not so much in the presentations but some key questions to speakers. The key here was summed up by one senior client when he asked me why the companies sponsoring the conference “don’t talk more about the experience they will give me and less on how they will get to findings”.

We live in an experience world. Attendees at IIEX APAC talked a lot about the “good speakers were the ones that offered a good experience”. Often more than the details of their presentation the “feeling” was what mattered. And that sentiment was transferred to pricing.

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With all the changes being introduced by new tech, all the promises of more efficiency, quantity, breadth, speed etc etc clients told me what stood out was when there was talk of price flexibility. Price based on expected outcomes, price based on added value. As one client said “I wish market researchers would stop talking about “insights”, I don’t pay them for a lot of insights, I want outcomes that help make decisions and will pay more for decisions that go the right way”. 

Aging is Growth: the Lifestage Discussion is Changing

So lovely to see more talk of the aging population opportunities and less emphasis on finding the tactical differences between new generations of youth. Lot’s of valuable discussion about how longevity is changing us as humans and as marketers.

Great cases of rethinking retirement and how dynamic that market is. Innovation for market researchers as participants in and co-funders of innovation technology for the over 60 age groups. We heard about AI being the insurer of economic growth in aging societies, of new techniques to understand how to adapt technologies for the fastest growing segments of the population in all Asian markets. 

Inclusivity was a theme across the conference but highlighted by the need to be more inclusive of the New Life Builders as I have been calling the life stage of 55-75+ for the last two decades. Not just by using modern tech. To understand people is more than using AI and it was very inspiring to see some of the sponsors and vendor companies explaining how they are using more traditional techniques to go and meet older people in towns and villages around the region to talk to those who can not or choose not to use smartphones.

As one vendor I heard reminding some listeners explaining we some times forget that only half the world has and uses internet/smartphone tech. Inclusivity means chasing those we cant reach or understand with “easy” techniques. And in Asia, and around the world there is no faster growing “inclusive necessary” group than those between middle age and old age. 

What You Know is More Important that What You Will Find

Mintel was there, Euromonitor was there. Both reminding us about something that clients and agencies too often forget: all the existing research. Databases, case libraries, collected stories, wins and failures. And not just these obvious vendors. Many speakers talked of being able to automate and utilize in new ways the vast experience of their organization. I heard at least half a dozen speakers describe how “ they can now use AI or similar tech to track across vast collected samples to re-align against all kinds of situations”.

Finally, maybe, hopefully the market research world will understand what the consultancy world has understood for decades…that what we mistakenly call “secondary” data is actually THE primary source and should be used more to provide learning and opportunities. And that doing new surveys and interviews is really just about filling in the gaps.

What was really refreshing though was the discussions as to how pricing will change because of the need to understand what we know better. That maybe with AI tools in place to better collect, codify and review existing research, articles, cases within organizations and with out market researchers need to rethink what they charge for and build their models on output of superior advice based on that scale and not on charging for processing new surveys.

Most shocking quote from the conference…a senior exec from a global top three agency admitting that she could not access all the cases undertaken by her company on any given category.

Most hopeful quote from the conference…an old client of mine telling me “ wow Dave, market researchers are finally starting to look beyond techniques and talk about achieving outcomes that affect people”.

Nothing like a good IIEX conference to get us thinking